Monday, April 9, 2018

"Long before Facebook, Twitter and Instagram weaponized the newsfeed, we had a technology that let us aggregate the news without annoying, creepy algorithms"

I blame Google.
Their decision to not find a way to make Google Reader work financially, shutting down for good July 1, 2013, was coincident with the hypergrowth of the power and evil of Facebook's newsfeed. Correlation ≠ causation be damned, I blame the GOOG.

From Wired:

It's Time for an RSS Revival

The modern web contains no shortage of
horrors, from ubiquitous ad trackers to all-consuming platforms to
YouTube comments, generally. Unfortunately, there's no panacea for what
ails this internet we've built. But anyone weary of black-box algorithms
controlling what you see online at least has a respite, one that's been
there all along but has often gone ignored. Tired of Twitter? Facebook
fatigued? It's time to head back to RSS.

For many of you, that means finding a replacement for Digg Reader,
which went the way of the ghost this month. Or maybe you haven't used
RSS since five years ago, when Google Reader, the beloved firehose of
news headlines got the axe.
For others, it means figuring out what the heck an RSS feed is in the
first place—we'll get to that in just a minute. And some of you have
already moved on to the next article in your Feedly queue.

No
matter what your current disposition, though, in this age of
algorithmic overreach there's something deeply satisfying about finding
stories beyond what your loudest Twitter follows shared, or that
Facebook's News Feed optimized into your life. And lots of tools that
can get you there.

Cue RSS

RSS
stands for Really Simple Syndication (or Rich Site Summary) and it was
first stitched into the tapestry of the open web around the turn of the
millennium. Its aim is straightforward: to make it easy to track updates
to the content of a given website in a standardized format.

In
practice, and for your purposes, that means it can give you a
comprehensive, regularly updated look at all of the content your
favorite sites publish throughout the day. Think of it as the ultimate
aggregator; every morsel from every source you care about, fed directly
to you. Or, more commonly, fed to you through an intermediary known as
an RSS feed reader, software that helps you wrangle all of those
disparate headlines into something remotely manageable.

The difference between getting news from an RSS
reader and getting it from Facebook or Twitter or Nuzzel or Apple News
is a bit like the difference between a Vegas buffet and an a la carte
menu. In either case, you decide what you actually want to consume. But
the buffet gives you a whole world of options you otherwise might never
have seen.

"There are multiple approaches to
connecting to news. Social felt pretty interesting at first, but when
you mix social and algorithmic, you can easily get into these noise
bubbles, or areas where you don't necessarily feel 100 percent in
control of the algorithm," says Edwin Khodabakchian, cofounder and CEO
of popular RSS reader Feedly. "A tool like Feedly gives you a more transparent and controllable way to connect to the information you need."...MUCH MORE